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Usability News Archive

January-June 2000

By Kristoffer Bohmann

June 28, 2000
Report: $20B in lost online sales. A report from Creative Good (warning: 2.35 MB; registration required) estimates that over $19 billion will be left unrealized in 2000 because of poor dotcom customer experiences. The estimate is calculated as follows (conversion rate is the number of transactions divided by the number of visitors per month or year):

Ecommerce industry 2000-revenue (estimate): $37 billion
Average conversion rate (estimate): 1.8%

40% increase in conversion rate
Added revenue: $37 x 40% = $14.8 billion

10% increase in order size
Added revenue: ($37 + $14.8) x 10% = $5.18 billion

Unrealized revenue: $19.98 billion

The formula has an error as the effect of 40% conversion rate increase (10% of $14.8 billion) should have been excluded. Otherwise both the added revenue and a percentage of it are included. So, the correct unrealized revenue estimate is $18.5 billion.

I do, however, find the formula realistic as conversion rates and order sizes often are improved through well-done usability work. But it should be kept in mind that estimates of industry revenues and conversion rates are highly uncertain. If ecommerce industry revenues fall short of expectations and drop from $37 to $20 billion, potential added revenue will only be $10 billion, and vice versa.

Nicole Rubin from Creative Good replies: In terms of the calculations, we purposely chose to calculate them the way we did because the improvement in customer experience makes more orders and larger orders at the same time. In hindsight, we could have done a better job of explaining that these are compound effects, not separate. (October 19, 2000)

June 27, 2000
Google claims market leadership. Google has indexed more than 1 billion web pages and now claims to be the largest search engine on the Internet. The company expects that it will provide 30 million searches per day in the near-future. This includes queries from Yahoo who recently chose Google as their main search engine. Google's success is noteworthy because they provide highly relevant results using a simplistic user interface.

June 27, 2000
Jakob Nielsen's products and services:

Website usability review: $30,000

Keynote speeches: $25,000

1-day usability seminar: $35,000

3-day usability workshop: $70,000

"Rent-a-Guru" consulting

All offered through Nielsen Norman Group

June 25, 2000
Content Integration Example. Any website can now integrate content from external sources. This page shows an example of how ever-changing news from a news provider can be integrated on a page.

June 23, 2000
20 User Tasks on Ecommerce Sites. Suggested tasks for testing ecommerce sites such as comparison of product features for products A and B.

June 23, 2000
Search engine ranking for Bohmann.dk. Bohmann.dk is currently ranked as site number 486 of 57,900 at Google.com when searching for usability.

June 22, 2000
Weblogs Enable More User-Centric Sites. Weblogs give users information from multiple sources in one page. Meanwhile, much administrative work is automated, which help authors focus on their writings.

June 21, 2000
Are hyperlinks patented? British Telecom claim they have rights to require patent licensing from large US websites that use hyperlinks. ISPs are asked to pay.

June 11, 2000
Ways to shop on the Web. Described list of ways Web users can shop the Web, including product review sites, group purchasing sites, multi-vendor catelogs, and more.

June 8, 2000
Haburi.com Usability Review. Boo Technology Still Alive at Haburi.com. Haburi.com makes several design mistakes, including too small windows and lack of navigation support.

June 4, 2000
Link pages. It's time to get rid of link pages with links to recommended online sites (unless your site is a portal). Why? Search technology deliver better and more updated content than most websites. Instead, outgoing links need to be integrated into Web pages to produce content of higher value. This can be operationalized through a simple goal: 80 percent of all detail pages (e.g., product pages) should contain 1-5 outgoing links to specific content.

June 1, 2000
How to spot usability problems. Spotting design elements with low usability can happen in two efficient ways. (1) Heuristic evaluation where the design elements are aligned with proven principles such as "user options should be visible". Design elements that don't match the principles are removed. (2) Experimental design that compares the usability of specific elements in two or more designs. The comparison shows which elements users consider more usable. Both techniques can be changed by using different numbers of test users, test users with different skills, different scenarios or no scenarios, and so on.

May 23, 2000
Modelling user tasks. Identifying the most important user tasks is critical to ecommerce sites. Researchers from MIT have developed a six-step framework (warning: 55 KB) for user interaction with intelligent agents. Despite some overlapping between the steps, the framework may assist the identification of Web users' tasks:

1. Need Identification: Users who don't know what they want identify their needs using such technologies as ingoing links, product descriptions, images, and user reviews.
2. Product Brokering: The user decides what to buy by retrieving more detailed content about products. Technologies in use may be product configurators, wish lists, recommendation systems, and effective product search results.
3. Merchant Brokering: Connecting users with vendors, manufacturers, auction sellers, and other sellers. Users decide who to buy from by retrieving information about price, warranty, availability, delivery time, reputation, etc. Techniques in use: Seller Web pages, outgoing hyperlinks to sellers, etc.
4. Terms: Users negotiate with seller about the terms of the transaction including shipment (air/surface), quantity, and price (same price if I buy 100 items?). Negotiation tasks varies in duration and complexity (some negotiation tasks may even be fully automated).
5. Purchase and Delivery: Completing the ordering process.
6. Service and Evaluation: Techniques for users to evaluate the product and transaction on the seller site or on independent sites.

May 20, 2000
Boo.com Usability Review. European Dot Com Crash: Basic assumptions behind the Boo.com design seems to be: Graphics, images, and advanced functionalities are important to users, while users don't mind slow download times and lack of control.

May 18, 2000
Comparison shopping. Price comparison sites like Priceline, MySimon, and EvenBetter enable users to compare prices across vendors and buy the cheapest product. While these services most likely will bring free trade to new heights, they still suffer from several usability problems:

• Most of these services lack customer reviews and product information other than prices. Therefore, they are only useful if users know exactly what they want.
• Comparison is only possible for books, computers, travels, and other popular e-commerce goods, while other important goods like groceries and services (e.g., dentists) currently are unavailable. Result: Low usefulness.
• Download speed is slow as the comparison services need to connect to vendor sites to get updated information. The problem gets even worse when searches are made for less common products.

May 15, 2000
Eye Tracking Study. Study conducted by the Stanford-Poynter project report that:

• Test users approached text first, photos and graphics second (e.g., graphics were only looked at 22 percent of the time). However, nearly every second test user looked at banner ads (this may be due to a selection bias in the study).
• Brief news items were read three times more than articles.
• When articles were read, eyes systematically went over more than 75 percent of the length.
• Test users often revisited pages and interlaced between sites by moving back and forth between browser windows rather than reading text serially.

May 9, 2000
Reading list. Modularity is an efficient way to build a complex design from smaller subsystems that can be designed independently yet function together as a whole.

May 8, 2000
Emerging Web capitalism. A reverse-auction marketplace is enabling IT buyers (in the US) to state their maximum buy price for defined orders and receive bids on orders from vendors. This lowers the costs of searching for business partners and is in turn likely to lower prices.

January 9, 2000
Writing for the Web. A recent study of how users read on the Web report that Web users prefer content that is concise, scannable, and without subjective opinions. So, product-related content should be written using highlighted words and paragraphs, short sentences, and visually short pages.

January 9, 2000
Rising customer power. Consumer power is increasing. Swedish Letsbuyit.com enable users to negotiate prices with traders of offerings ranging from video cameras to travels. This method may become even more promising when applied to transactions within business-to-business.